Free The Last Run by Greg Rucka Page B

bloody happy, Nicky.”
    “Do I?”
    “No, you look like I just uprooted your herb garden, actually.”
    Poole made a clicking sound with his tongue. “You tell Chris?”
    “Figured it could wait until he was back from Mosul.”
    “Probably best. If I tell you how much you’ll be missed, it’s not going to make a bit of difference, will it?”
    “Not a whit of it,” Chace said. “But the effort is appreciated.”
    It took two hours of searching through Archives before Poole found references to an agent named Falcon in the reports of Jeremy Newsom. For security reasons, the documents couldn’t be removed from the room, so Chace and Poole spent another ninety minutes working at a set of facing desks, in surprisingly poor light, reading through the reams of paperwork Newsom had produced. All Stations delivered daily reports, normally no more than a page or two in length, but as the Revolution had approached, Newsom—along with his Number One, a man named Andrew Thurman—had seen the writing on the wall, and their signals had consequently increased in both frequency and length. SIS had, in turn, responded, accepting their analysis, and at several points Chace ran across “US–UK EYES ONLY” stamps, indicating that the information had, in fact, been shared with the CIA, only to be disputed and even disregarded, in turn, by the U.S. State Department.
    There were only a handful of references to Falcon, but from what Chace and Poole could gather, he was a young man, a soldier, and had passed on some minor, but useful, information about support for Khomeini within the armed forces. His associated expenses totaled up to just under twenty-two thousand pounds, which led Chace to conclude Falcon had been a paid source, rather than an ideological one.
    Nowhere within the files did either of them find anything that explained the phrase “the grapes are in the water.”
    As Poole was replacing the reports, Chace used the internal circuit to call up to D-Ops. Personnel files were kept by the Security Division, technically part of the Operations Directorate, and classified anywhere from Secret, in the case of general staff, to Top Secret, in the case of senior staff, for a minimum of fifty years from the date of recruitment to SIS. Access required written permission from D-Ops, or, in the case of senior staff, from the Deputy Chief or C.
    Crocker came on the line with a characteristic growl.
    “I need written permission to draw the personnel files of Thurman, Andrew, and Newsom, Jeremy,” Chace told him.
    “Who the bloody hell are they?”
    “They were the Station One and Two for Tehran just prior to the Revolution.”
    “This is about Barnett’s signal?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I’ll clear it.”
    The runner was waiting for them when Chace and Poole returned to the Pit, two massive files in his hands. Chace signed for the documents, handed over the one for Jeremy Newsom to Poole, and was about to settle in at her desk to read up on Andrew Thurman when she saw that the file had a “DECEASED” stamp across its face. She tossed it aside, and she and Poole each took half of the substantial Newsom file, trading papers back and forth as they read.
    Jeremy Newsom was an old warhorse. He’d started in the Army in 1953, in the Prince of Wales’ Division, the Sherwood Foresters, promoted to Sergeant while fighting against the communists in Malaysia. Recruited by the Firm at the height of the Cold War, he’d been sent to Oxford, where he’d studied Oriental Language and Culture, as it had then been called. His initial Station famil had been Cairo, followed by turns up and down the Persian Gulf, from Kuwait to Bahrain to Oman, with years spent in London in between, working a variety of Desks both in-house and in Whitehall. Security reports, evaluations, and commendations filled the rest of the folder.
    From what Chace read, Newsom had been a good officer, if not an admirable family man. He had married while in the Army, and